If you’re on a bandwidth limited network, how many times have you wished you could stop that Youtube video from loading automatically on some random blog post? Flash applications on the web usually slow down the page load, which may be not very noticable on fast computers, but on slower ones it really is.

What can we do about it and still be able to use Flash (for watching videos on Youtube, Vimeo and others, playing flash games on any game site and etc.)? One way would be to make Flash load on demand.

By allowing Flash (and any other plugins for that matter, e.g. PDF) to load only on demand, we:

• Save bandwidth (usually not much, but it’s still worth it)
• Get a more responsive browser
• Pages load faster

So how do we do it?

Setting Flash to load on demand

1. Click on the Wrench image in top right corner
2. Select Settings from the menu
3. Scroll down and click on Show advanced settings
4. Under Privacy section click on Content settings... button
5. Scroll down and under Plug-ins section click on Click to play button
6. You’re done!

If you’ve done everything correctly, instead of a flash player, you should see a gray box with an image of a puzzle piece in the middle of it with text Click to run Flash.

If you wish to load the Flash embed, just click on the box where it says Click to run Flash.